Red meat has a huge carbon footprint because cattle requires a large amount of land and water.

https://sph.tulane.edu/climate-and-food-environmental-impact-beef-consumption

Demand for steaks and burgers is the primary driver of Deforestation:

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-beef-industry-fueling-amazon-rainforest-destruction-deforestation/

https://e360.yale.edu/features/marcel-gomes-interview

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-06-02/almost-a-billion-trees-felled-to-feed-appetite-for-brazilian-beef

If you don’t have a car and rarely eat red meat, you are doing GREAT 🙌 🙌

Sure, you can drink tap water instead of plastic water. You can switch to Tea. You can travel by train. You can use Linux instead of Windows AI’s crap. Those are great ideas. Also, don’t drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.

  • booly@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    8 hours ago

    That’s a good chart, and probably a better metric to use.

    Still, you can see the same overall trends: the western world peaking around 2000, with India and China catching up. The question, then, becomes whether and how much the rest of the world can follow the West’s playbook:

    • Switching from coal to natural gas for electricity generation (easy for North America, more difficult for Europe)
    • Switching from fossil fuels entirely to carbon-free sources like nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal (depends heavily on geography and access to nuclear materials and engineering).
    • Switching from fossil fuels to cleaner electrified drivetrains
    • Improving energy efficiency in residential, commercial, industrial applications.

    This is where the difference is made. Not in changing birth rates.

    • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
      1·
      7 hours ago

      I fear that the likes of Trump in charge will only reverse any progress we’ve made in the West.

      The developing world is going to use more and fossil fuels unless we basically pay them to use something else. And foreign aid seems to be a thing of the past too. I can’t really blame the rest of the world. The west has grown fat and rich off the last 150 years of using it, and now we’ve got the gall to turn to them and tell them not to.